The Journal
Burnt out, or just tired? What the word actually covers at home
Three states are being asked about under one word, and they have different evidence behind them: burnout as the World Health Organization defines it, parental burnout as researchers have measured it, and ordinary tiredness with its medical causes. This piece draws the boundary using the ICD-11 entry, the validation studies behind the Parental Burnout Assessment, a 49-study meta-analysis, and the NHS's own threshold for booking an appointment. It also says plainly where the evidence runs out.
Three states, and how to tell which one you are in
Three different things are being asked about under one word, and they separate cleanly.
The first is burnout as it is actually defined. The World Health Organization defines burn-out in ICD-11 as "a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed", and the entry says it "refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life". WHO adds that it is not classified as a medical condition.
The second is parental burnout: a separate construct with its own validated questionnaire and its own four dimensions, tested against job burnout and depression and found not to collapse into either.
The third is ordinary tiredness, including the medical causes of tiredness the NHS asks people to get checked.
Exhaustion bounded to the parental role — feeling unlike the parent you used to be, going through the motions with your own children — is the second thing. Undifferentiated tiredness lasting a few weeks for no obvious reason is the third, and the NHS's advice there is to book an appointment rather than settle on a label.
Burnout has a definition in ICD-11, and the definition is about work
WHO's 2019 news release announcing the ICD-11 entry gives the definition in full. Burn-out has three dimensions: "feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; increased mental distance from one's job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job; and reduced professional efficacy". All three are anchored to a job.
Where the entry sits matters too. WHO places burn-out in the ICD-11 chapter "Factors influencing health status or contact with health services", which it describes as covering reasons people contact health services "but that are not classed as illnesses or health conditions". Burn-out "was also included in ICD-10, in the same category as in ICD-11, but the definition is now more detailed" — the same non-illness category, with a thinner definition.
The instrument everyone cites agrees. Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter, in World Psychiatry in 2016, define burnout as "a psychological syndrome emerging as a prolonged response to chronic interpersonal stressors on the job", its dimensions "an overwhelming exhaustion, feelings of cynicism and detachment from the job, and a sense of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment". The general version of their inventory was written so that it "could be used within any occupation" — a generalisation across jobs, not out of them. They are blunt about the shortcut at issue here: "exhaustion alone is not a proxy for burnout", and to ignore "these core aspects of the burnout experience" — cynicism and efficacy as much as exhaustion — would, in their words, truly be a mis-diagnosis.
Parental burnout is a separate construct, and it has been measured separately
Parental burnout was not borrowed from the workplace construct. The psychologists Roskam, Brianda and Mikolajczak built the Parental Burnout Assessment out of parents' own testimony and tested it on 901 French- and English-speaking parents, publishing in Frontiers in Psychology in 2018. Factor analysis found four dimensions, not three: "exhaustion in one's parental role, contrast with previous parental self, feelings of being fed up with one's parental role and emotional distancing from one's children". The second has no counterpart in the occupational model: the sense of being a worse parent than you were is specific to the home. In that sample, parental burnout correlated with job burnout at r = .42.
Whether the two are genuinely separate was tested head-on. Mikolajczak, Gross, Stinglhamber, Lindahl Norberg and Roskam reported two studies of 3,482 participants in Clinical Psychological Science in 2020: items measuring parental burnout, job burnout and depressive symptoms "loaded on different factors", and each had consequences the others did not explain — "parental neglect and parental violence for parental burnout; intent to leave the company for job burnout".
Separate is not unrelated. A 2023 review in Current Directions in Psychological Science by Mikolajczak, Aunola, Sorkkila and Roskam, pooling 49 studies and 35,170 parents, put the aggregated correlation with job burnout at .35 and with depression at .55 — closer to depression than to the thing it is named after. The authors' distinction is that its loss of pleasure is "contextualized to parenthood", where depression "affects all spheres of life".
Household burnout: a borrowed word, and the load it points at
No instrument measures the running of a household as such. What the field has built are measures of roles: the job, in the Maslach inventories; the parental role, in the Parental Burnout Assessment; the working parent, in a 2022 scale whose authors describe theirs as "the first known scales to measure working parent burnout". The systematic review that pooled fifteen years of this literature is a review of parental burnout, and its table of correlates is made of facts about parents, children and families — hours spent with children, family disorganisation, coparenting disagreement, the number of adults doing the caring. Housework as such is not among them. That is a statement about what has been built and measured rather than proof that nothing else exists, but it is the honest answer to whether household burnout is a condition: the word is borrowed from a classification that says not to borrow it, and nothing has yet been put behind it.
The load it points at is measurable even where the label is not. The Office for National Statistics, in its Time use in the UK bulletin covering 23 September to 1 October 2023, found women spent an average of 3 hours 37 minutes a day on unpaid work — housework, caring for others and volunteering — against 2 hours 43 minutes for men. Those are experimental statistics from 3,659 completed diaries counting main activities only, so the hour spent half-watching a child while doing something else does not appear at all.
How common the resulting state is in Britain, nobody can say. The 42-country study discussed in the next section had a UK cell of 271 parents recruited by snowball and convenience — a sample result, not a national rate — and its authors note that published prevalence estimates range between 1% and 30% and are hard to interpret, because instruments, cutoffs and populations all differ. Who notices and who decides is a separate argument, made elsewhere on this site; this piece is about the person who notices, when they run out.
What a job has that a household does not
That a household has no cover is an argument rather than a finding, and should be labelled as one: nothing in the research cited here tests whether exhaustion at work is partly absorbed by colleagues while exhaustion at home compounds. What holds without a study is that paid employment sits on a statutory floor, and that the floor is written down. Sick pay is an employer's liability to an employee — section 151 of the Social Security Contributions and Benefits Act 1992 in Great Britain, section 147 of the parallel Northern Ireland Act of the same year — and the government's guidance states the condition plainly: to qualify you must "be classed as an employee", which the self-employed are not. Paid leave is built the same way: four weeks under regulation 13 of the Working Time Regulations 1998 and another 1.6 weeks under regulation 13A, which is the "5.6 weeks' paid holiday a year" the guidance gives "almost all people classed as workers", with irregular-hours and part-year workers accruing theirs by the hour under regulation 15B for leave years starting from April 2024. Those regulations "extend to Great Britain only", their own regulation 1(2) says; Northern Ireland sets out the same four weeks and 1.6 weeks in regulations 15 and 16 of its 2016 regulations. A household has none of it, for anyone. Nothing is reassigned. The washing waits.
What has been tested is what protects parents, and the answer keeps coming back as other people. The International Investigation of Parental Burnout surveyed 17,409 parents across 42 countries, 71% of them mothers, and reported in Affective Science in 2021 that prevalence varies dramatically. At the stricter of its two cutoff scores on the Parental Burnout Assessment — 92 on the assessment's 0 to 138 scale, the one the authors kept for their analyses because they wanted to avoid overdiagnosis — it ran from 0.0% in Cuba to 7.7% in Poland and 8.1% in Belgium; at the looser cutoff of 86 those three read 0.0%, 9.6% and 9.8%. Three of the 42 rows, Pakistan, Peru and Thailand, print a higher prevalence at the stricter cutoff than at the looser one, which cannot be right, since every parent scoring 92 or above also scores 86 or above. What tracked the spread was not workload. Individualism, scored on Hofstede's cultural values, "was the sole value to be significantly associated with both the mean level and prevalence of parental burnout", at an effect the authors call large by Cohen's norms (d = 1.16), and it held after controls for sociodemographics, parental workload including hours spent with children, economic inequality and the five other cultural values (B = 0.24, p < 0.001). That is a correlation across countries, not a demonstration that individualism causes burnout; the authors say further study is needed to explain why. Their conclusion: "strengthening the social network of mutual aid and solidarity around families might well help to decrease the prevalence".
The paper states its own limits: country samples ran from 95 in Colombia to 1,730 in Finland, mothers were overrepresented in almost every country, residual confounding cannot be ruled out, and the measure may capture a kind of parenting more relevant to individualistic cultures. Recruitment appears in its methods table rather than among those limits, and it is the looser kind: 39 of the 42 country samples were snowball, convenience or both, the exceptions being stratified samples in Burundi and Lebanon and a quota sample run by a research company in Japan.
Why rest is not the opposite of this, and what takes weight off rather than hours
Rest is not the opposite of this, and the correlations show why. The 2023 review grades its own effect sizes: an r below .099 is "trivial or null", .10 to .24 small, .25 to .37 moderate, above .37 large. Hours spent with children came out at .085 across 8 studies and 6,593 parents — trivial by that scale. The number of children was .081 (13 studies, 10,294 parents), and the number of men taking care of the children .000, the number of women .021 (4 studies, 2,488 parents).
The stronger effects are about the shape of the arrangement rather than its size. Family disorganisation correlated with parental burnout at .485 (3 studies, 4,124 parents) and social support at −.376 (2 studies pooled, 897 parents), both large by that scale, with sleep problems at .325 (4 studies, 5,786 parents) and coparenting disagreement at .258 (2 studies, 2,401 parents) in the moderate band. Several of those rest on two or three studies and are best read as current estimates rather than settled numbers; the hours and depression rows are the robust ones.
The model the field works from, as that review describes it, is an imbalance rather than an absolute quantity: parental burnout is supposed to occur when the factors that increase parenting stress are "chronically more numerous or serious than the factors that alleviate it". On that account a risk that cannot be removed can be offset by adding resources. The review is candid that the framework "lacks investigation".
All of this is correlational and mostly cross-sectional: it describes what travels with parental burnout, not what causes it. Still, an afternoon off changes hours, and hours sit in the trivial band of the review's own scale, below the .099 line, in company with the number of children and the number of adults doing the caring. The review's own reading is that the factors most related to parental burnout "are all factors upon which psychologists can act" — family disorganisation, low emotional intelligence, low social support, perfectionism, coparenting disagreement, work-family conflict — while the fixed facts of a household, the number of children, their ages, single parenthood, barely predict it at all. Not all of those describe an arrangement: trait emotional intelligence at −.445 is about the person, and parenting stress, at .503, is higher than family disorganisation. But the arrangement is the part somebody else in the house can change.
Tired, burnt out, or something a GP should look at
Two of the three states here are not medical. The third can be, and it is worth ruling out first, because it is the only one with a test.
The NHS asks people to see a GP if "you've been feeling tired for a few weeks and you're not sure why", if "your tiredness affects your daily life", or if you feel tired and have other symptoms "such as weight loss or mood changes". Its list of causes includes stress, depression and life challenges "such as bereavement or looking after a new baby"; its list of conditions includes sleep apnoea, iron deficiency anaemia, diabetes, an overactive thyroid and ME/CFS. What it says about testing is narrower than the hope people bring to it: you "may need tests, such as blood tests to check for anaemia, diabetes or hyperthyroidism" — three of those five conditions, and a check rather than a verdict.
For low mood the NHS gives a threshold precise enough to use: see a GP "if you experience symptoms of depression for most of the day, every day, for more than 2 weeks". More than a fortnight at that intensity, or a few weeks of tiredness you cannot account for, is where the question stops being which word applies and becomes an appointment.
This page was checked against its sources on 14 September 2026 and will be reviewed again by March 2027. Two of the NHS pages cited, on tiredness and fatigue and on the symptoms of depression, were past their own stated next-review dates on the day of checking — 2 June 2026 and 5 July 2026.
Sources
- Carries every WHO quotation in sections 1 and 2. Gives the ICD-11 definition of burn-out verbatim ("a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed"), the three dimensions including "reduced professional efficacy", and the instruction that it "refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life". Also states that burn-out "is not classified as a medical condition"; that it "is described in the chapter: 'Factors influencing health status or contact with health services' — which includes reasons for which people contact health services but that are not classed as illnesses or health conditions"; and that it "was also included in ICD-10, in the same category as in ICD-11, but the definition is now more detailed". I re-grepped the raw HTML on 14 September 2026: the strings "QD85" and "Z73" appear nowhere on it, so the piece states no ICD code at all. — World Health Organization, "Burn-out an 'occupational phenomenon': International Classification of Diseases", WHO news release, 28 May 2019, 2019
- Source for the third paragraph of section 2. Defines burnout as "a psychological syndrome emerging as a prolonged response to chronic interpersonal stressors on the job", with three dimensions: "an overwhelming exhaustion, feelings of cynicism and detachment from the job, and a sense of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment". States that the MBI General Survey was developed so that it "could be used within any occupation". Warns that "exhaustion alone is not a proxy for burnout", and writes: "To ignore these core aspects of the burnout experience would truly be a 'mis-diagnosis' that could have important ramifications for both policy and practice" — the preceding sentences make "these core aspects" exhaustion, cynicism and efficacy together, which is how the piece now renders it. — Maslach, C., & Leiter, M. P., "Understanding the burnout experience: recent research and its implications for psychiatry", World Psychiatry, 15(2), 103–111, 2016
- Source for the first paragraph of section 3. Validation of the Parental Burnout Assessment on 901 French- and English-speaking parents. Factor analyses found "an identifiable parental burnout syndrome including four dimensions" — "exhaustion in one's parental role, contrast with previous parental self, feelings of being fed up with one's parental role and emotional distancing from one's children". Table 5 gives the correlation between the PBA total score and job burnout (measured with the MBI-General Survey) as 0.42, p < 0.001. — Roskam, I., Brianda, M.-E., & Mikolajczak, M., "A Step Forward in the Conceptualization and Measurement of Parental Burnout: The Parental Burnout Assessment (PBA)", Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 758, 2018
- Source for the second paragraph of section 3. This URL is the open-access author accepted manuscript deposited at UCLouvain (landing record: hdl.handle.net/2078.1/224963); I downloaded and read it. Its abstract carries "N = 3,482", "loaded on different factors", and "parental and job burnout also each had specific consequences (e.g., parental neglect and parental violence for parental burnout; intent to leave the company for job burnout) that are not explained by depressive symptoms" — the three strings quoted in the piece, identical to the published abstract. The version of record is Clinical Psychological Science 8(4), 673–689, doi 10.1177/2167702620917447; the SAGE page refuses automated requests (403), so the volume, issue, pages and abstract wording were cross-checked in the publisher's Crossref deposit at api.crossref.org/works/10.1177/2167702620917447. — Mikolajczak, M., Gross, J. J., Stinglhamber, F., Lindahl Norberg, A., & Roskam, I., "Is Parental Burnout Distinct From Job Burnout and Depressive Symptoms?", Clinical Psychological Science, 8(4), 673–689 (author accepted manuscript), 2020
- Source for the third paragraph of section 3, for section 4's description of what the field has measured, and for every figure in section 6. This URL is the open-access author accepted manuscript PDF in the University of Jyväskylä repository, which serves Table 1 in full; the repository landing page (jyx.jyu.fi/jyx/Record/jyx_123456789_89818) does not. Correlational meta-analysis of all empirical parental-burnout studies published to July 2021 (k = 49, N total = 35,170). Table 1 gives: job burnout .353 (7 studies, N = 7,490), depression .552 (15, 12,178), hours spent with children .085 (8, 6,593), number of children .081 (13, 10,294), number of men taking care of children .000 and number of women .021 (4 studies each, 2,488), family disorganization .485 (3, 4,124), social support −.376 (2, 897), coparenting disagreement .258 (2, 2,401), sleep problems .325 (4, 5,786), trait emotional intelligence −.445 (2, 2,061), parenting stress .503 (7, 5,825). Table 1's note sets the bands: "r < 0.099 are considered trivial or null; 0.10 < r < 0.24 are considered small, 0.25 < r < 0.37 are considered moderate; r > 0.37 are considered large effects." The text states that parental burnout occurs when the factors increasing parenting stress are "chronically more numerous or serious than the factors that alleviate it", that this framework "lacks investigation", that "the factors most related to PB are all factors upon which psychologists can act: family disorganization (.49), low emotional intelligence (-.45), low social support (-.38), perceived socially prescribed perfectionism (.38), perfectionist parenting concerns (.37), coparenting disagreement (.26) and work-family conflict (.23)", that number of children, single parenthood and children's ages "poorly predict" it, and that the loss of pleasure is "contextualized to parenthood" while depression "affects all spheres of life". Table 1 contains no housework or domestic-labour row — the basis for section 4's narrowed statement. Version of record: Current Directions in Psychological Science 32(4), 276–283, doi 10.1177/09637214221142777, paywalled at SAGE. — Mikolajczak, M., Aunola, K., Sorkkila, M., & Roskam, I., "15 Years of Parental Burnout Research: Systematic Review and Agenda", Current Directions in Psychological Science, 32(4), 276–283 (author accepted manuscript), 2023
- Source for section 4's example of a role-specific instrument and for the quotation "These are the first known scales to measure working parent burnout". Cross-sectional survey of 1,285 parents living with children under 18; content, face, construct and predictive validity and reliability established; Cronbach alpha 0.90 with item four removed; one-factor model supported by confirmatory factor analysis. The PubMed record page returns a cookie notice to automated requests, so this URL is the NCBI E-utilities endpoint, which serves the full abstract text for PMID 35811259 (J Pediatr Health Care 2022 Nov-Dec;36(6):540–548, doi 10.1016/j.pedhc.2022.05.020). — Gawlik, K. S., Melnyk, B. M., Mu, J., & Tan, A., "Psychometric Properties of the New Working Parent Burnout Scale", Journal of Pediatric Health Care, 36(6), 540–548, 2022
- Source for the second paragraph of section 4. "Women spent an average of 3 hours and 37 minutes per day doing unpaid work activities including housework, caring for others and volunteering between 23 September and 1 October 2023; this was 54 minutes more than the average among men at 2 hours and 43 minutes." Experimental statistics from the ONS Online Time Use Survey: 5,000 adults sampled from the NatCen Panel, 10,000 diary days issued, 3,659 (36.6%) diaries completed with sufficient information to be weighted and included. "Estimates are based on the main activities that respondents reported doing during their diary day. Time spent doing secondary or passive activities is not included." — Office for National Statistics, "Time use in the UK: 23 September to 1 October 2023", statistical bulletin, released 9 November 2023, 2023
- Source for the UK cell in section 4 and for the whole of section 5's second and third paragraphs. 17,409 parents (12,364 mothers and 5,045 fathers, i.e. 71%) in 42 countries. Cutoffs are given as "cutoff scores: 92 and 86 on a scale from 0 to 138"; the authors "then considered the most stringent cutoff, (i.e., the most conservative prevalence scores), for subsequent analyses" out of a "wish to avoid overdiagnosis", and Figure 1 defines prevalence as "scoring 92 or above". Table 1 rows used here (prevalence at 86, then at 92): Cuba 0.0 and 0.0, Poland 9.6 and 7.7, Belgium 9.8 and 8.1, UK 3.3 and 3.0. I parsed all 42 rows: three print a higher figure at the stricter cutoff than at the looser one — Pakistan 0.0 and 0.9, Peru 1.0 and 1.3, Thailand 0.2 and 0.3 — which is arithmetically impossible and is reported in the piece as an inconsistency in the published table. Also carries: "Individualism was the sole value to be significantly associated with both the mean level and prevalence of parental burnout" (country positions taken from Hofstede's six cultural values); "the effect size is large (d = 1.16) according to Cohen's norms"; individualism "significantly predictive of parental burnout beyond sociodemographic variables, parental workload, economic inequalities across countries, and the five other cultural values (B = 0.24, p < 0.001)"; "further studies are needed to clarify why parents in more individualistic countries are more exposed to parental burnout"; and "strengthening the social network of mutual aid and solidarity around families might well help to decrease the prevalence of parental burnout in individualistic countries". The Limitations section lists four items: sample sizes "from 95 (Colombia) to 1,730 (Finland)", mothers overrepresented "in almost all countries", residual confounding, and the possibility that the measure captures a parenting type more relevant to individualistic cultures. Recruitment is in Table 2, not the limitations: counting its 42 rows gives 22 "Snowball and convenience", 11 "Convenience", 5 "Snowball" and 1 "Convenience and quota" — 39 — with Burundi and Lebanon stratified and Japan quota sampled by a research company. Table 3 gives the UK sample as 271 parents; Table 2 records UK recruitment as "Snowball and convenience", 100% online. The introduction notes prevalence estimates "varying between 1 and 30%" and "difficult to interpret". — Roskam, I., Aguiar, J., Akgun, E., et al. (IIPB Consortium), "Parental Burnout Around the Globe: a 42-Country Study", Affective Science, 2(1), 58–79, 2021
- Source for the second paragraph of section 7 and for the review date named in the last paragraph. "See a GP if: you've been feeling tired for a few weeks and you're not sure why; your tiredness affects your daily life; you feel tired and have other symptoms, such as weight loss or mood changes". Causes listed include "stress, depression and dealing with life challenges, such as bereavement or looking after a new baby" — the page says "looking after a new baby", not "being a new parent", and the piece now follows it. Conditions listed include sleep apnoea, iron deficiency anaemia, diabetes, overactive thyroid (hyperthyroidism) and ME/CFS. On testing the page says only: "You may need tests, such as blood tests to check for anaemia, diabetes or hyperthyroidism." Page last reviewed 02 June 2023, next review due 02 June 2026 — both still displayed when I fetched the page on 14 September 2026. — NHS, "Tiredness and fatigue", 2023
- Source for the depression threshold in the third paragraph of section 7 and for the second review date in the last paragraph. "See a GP if you experience symptoms of depression for most of the day, every day, for more than 2 weeks." Page last reviewed 5 July 2023, next review due 5 July 2026 — both still displayed when I fetched the page on 14 September 2026. Listed separately from the tiredness page because it is a different document at a different URL and carries a different quotation. — NHS, "Depression in adults: Symptoms", 2023
- Source for the sick-pay condition quoted in section 5: "To qualify for Statutory Sick Pay (SSP) you must: be classed as an employee; have done some work for your employer; have been ill for at least one full working day." People not classed as employees, including the self-employed, do not qualify. Fetched and read 14 September 2026. — GOV.UK, "Statutory Sick Pay (SSP): Eligibility", 2026
- Source for the plain-English summary quoted in section 5: "Almost all people classed as workers are legally entitled to 5.6 weeks' paid holiday a year (known as statutory leave entitlement or annual leave)", including agency workers, irregular-hours workers and part-year workers; "Most workers who work a 5-day week must receive at least 28 days' paid annual leave a year." This is GB-facing guidance summarising the Working Time Regulations 1998, which is why the piece names Great Britain and cites the Northern Ireland regulations separately. Fetched and read 14 September 2026. — GOV.UK, "Holiday entitlement: Entitlement", 2026
- Source for "sick pay is an employer's liability to an employee" in Great Britain. Section 151(1), headed "Employer's liability" and marked E+W+S: "Where an employee has a day of incapacity for work in relation to his contract of service with an employer, that employer shall, if the conditions set out in sections 153 and 154 below are satisfied, be liable to make him... a payment (to be known as 'statutory sick pay') in respect of that day." Revised text on legislation.gov.uk, read 14 September 2026. — Social Security Contributions and Benefits Act 1992, section 151, 1992
- Source for the Northern Ireland half of the same sentence. Section 147(1), headed "Employer's liability" and marked N.I., is word-for-word the Great Britain provision with its conditions in sections 149 and 150: "Where an employee has a day of incapacity for work in relation to his contract of service with an employer, that employer shall... be liable to make him... a payment (to be known as 'statutory sick pay') in respect of that day." Revised text on legislation.gov.uk, read 14 September 2026. — Social Security Contributions and Benefits (Northern Ireland) Act 1992, section 147, 1992
- Source for the extent quoted in section 5. Regulation 1 is headed "Citation, commencement and extent" and marked E+W+S; regulation 1(2) reads in full: "These Regulations extend to Great Britain only." This is why the article says Great Britain rather than the UK for annual leave, and cites Northern Ireland's own regulations alongside. Read 14 September 2026. — The Working Time Regulations 1998, regulation 1, 1998
- Source for "four weeks under regulation 13". Regulation 13(1): "Subject to paragraph (5), a worker is entitled to four weeks' annual leave in each leave year." Regulation 13(A1), inserted in 2023, limits the regulation to leave years beginning before 1 April 2024 and, for later leave years, to workers to whom regulation 15B does not apply — which is why the piece also names regulation 15B. Revised text read 14 September 2026. — The Working Time Regulations 1998, regulation 13, 1998
- Source for "another 1.6 weeks under regulation 13A". Regulation 13A(1)–(2)(e): a worker is entitled to additional leave of "1.6 weeks" in any leave year beginning on or after 1 April 2009; 13A(3): "The aggregate entitlement provided for in paragraph (2) and regulation 13(1) is subject to a maximum of 28 days." Four weeks plus 1.6 weeks is the 5.6 weeks of the GOV.UK summary. Revised text read 14 September 2026. — The Working Time Regulations 1998, regulation 13A, 1998
- Source for the clause about irregular-hours and part-year workers. Regulation 15B applies to an irregular hours worker or a part-year worker "in respect of any leave years beginning on or after 1st April 2024"; their entitlement is what they have accrued, accruing "on the last day of each pay period at the rate of 12.07% of the number of hours that they have worked during that pay period", capped at 28 days a year. Read 14 September 2026. — The Working Time Regulations 1998, regulation 15B, 1998
- Source for Northern Ireland's four weeks. Regulation 15(1), marked N.I.: "Subject to paragraph (4), a worker is entitled to four weeks' annual leave in each leave year." Read 14 September 2026. — The Working Time Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2016, regulation 15, 2016
- Source for Northern Ireland's additional 1.6 weeks. Regulation 16(1): "Subject to regulation 33 and paragraphs (2) and (4), a worker is entitled to a period of 1.6 weeks additional leave in each leave year"; 16(2): "The aggregate entitlement provided for in paragraph (1) and regulation 15(1) is subject to a maximum of 28 days." Same minimum as Great Britain, set by a separate instrument. Read 14 September 2026. — The Working Time Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2016, regulation 16, 2016
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